The SSD Relapse: Understanding and Choosing the Best SSD
by Anand Lal Shimpi on August 30, 2009 12:00 AM EST- Posted in
- Storage
Random Read/Write Speed
This test writes 4KB in a completely random pattern over an 8GB space of the drive to simulate the sort of random writes that you'd see on an OS drive (even this is more stressful than a normal desktop user would see). I perform three concurrent IOs and run the test for 3 minutes. The results reported are in average MB/s over the entire time:
As we established in previous articles, the disk operations that feel the slowest are the random small file reads and writes. Both of which are easily handled by an SSD. A good friend of mine and former AnandTech Editor, Matthew Witheiler, asked me if he'd notice the performance improvement. I showed him the chart above.
He asked again if he'd notice. I said, emphatically, yes.
Now this is super interesting. Intel's X25-M G1 drops from 40.8MB/s when new down to 26.3MB/s in a well used state. Unfortunately for the G1, it will never get TRIM and will spend more time in the lower performance state over the life of the drive. But look at what happens with the X25-M G2: it drops from 36.1MB/s to 35.8MB/s - virtually no performance is lost. In fact, the G2 is so fast here that it outperforms the super expensive X25-E. Granted you don't get the lifespan of the X25-E and the SLC drive should perform better on more strenuous random write tests, but this is a major improvement.
The explanation? It actually boils down to the amount of memory on the drive. The X25-M G1 had 16MB of 166MHz SDRAM on-board, the G2 upped it to 32MB of slower 133MHz DRAM. Remember that Intel doesn't keep any user data in DRAM, it's only used for the remapping, defragmenting and tracking of all of the data being written to the drive. More DRAM means that the drive can now track more data, which means that even in the heaviest of random-write workloads you could toss at it on a normal desktop you will not actually lose any performance with the drive in a used state. And this is the drive Intel has decided to grant TRIM to.
The G2 is good.
The Indilinx drives do lose performance here. They drop from roughly 13MB/s down to 7MB/s. We're still talking ~5x the speed of a VelociRaptor, so there's no cause for alarm. But it's clear that even Indilinx's SLC drive can't match Intel's random write performance. And from what I hear, Intel's performance is only going to get better.
This is what the X25-M price premium gets you.
Bahahaha, look at the hard drive scores here: 0.7MB/s and 0.3MB/s? That's freakin' terrible! And that's why your system feels so slow when you start it up, there are a ton of concurrent random reads and writes happening all over the place which your hard drive crunches through at roughly 0.5MB/s. Even the Samsung based OCZ Summit manages a significant performance advantage here.
The Indilinx drives all cluster around the 30 - 40MB/s mark for random read performance, nothing to be ashamed of. The Intel drives kick it up a notch and give you roughly 60MB/s of random read performance. It's a noticeable improvement. As our application launch tests will show however, loading a single app on either an Indilinx or Intel drive will take about the same amount of time. It's only in the heavy multitasking and "seat of the pants" feel that you'll have a chance at feeling a difference.
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minime - Tuesday, September 1, 2009 - link
Thanks for that, but still, this is not quite a real business test, right?Live - Monday, August 31, 2009 - link
Great article! Again I might add.Just a quick question:
In the article it says all Indilinx drives are basically the same. But there are 2 controllers:
Indilinx IDX110M00-FC
Indilinx IDX110M00-LC
What's the difference?
yacoub - Monday, August 31, 2009 - link
If Idle Garbage Collection cannot be turned off, how can it be called "[Another] option that Indilinx provides its users"? If it's not optional, it's not an option. :(Anand Lal Shimpi - Monday, August 31, 2009 - link
Well it's sort of optional since you had to upgrade to the idle GC firmware to enable it. That firmware has since been pulled and I've informed at least one of the companies involved of the dangers associated with it. We'll see what happens...Take care,
Anand
helloAnand - Monday, August 31, 2009 - link
Anand,The best way to test compiler performance is compiling the compiler itself ;). GCC has an enormous test suite (I/O bound) to boot. Building it on windows is complicated, so you can try compiling the latest version on the mac.
Anand Lal Shimpi - Monday, August 31, 2009 - link
Hmm I've never played with the gcc test suite, got any pointers you can email me? :)Take care,
Anand
UNHchabo - Tuesday, September 1, 2009 - link
Compiling almost anything on Visual Studio also tends to be IO-bound, so you could try that as well.CMGuy - Wednesday, September 2, 2009 - link
We've got a few big java apps at work and the compile times are heavily I/O bound. Like it takes 30 minutes to build on a 15 disk SAN array (The cpu usage barely gets above 30%). Got a 160Gig G2 on order, very much looking forward to benchmarking the build on it!CMGuy - Sunday, October 11, 2009 - link
Finally got an X25-m G2 to benchmark our builds on. What was previously a 30 minute build on a 15 disk SAN array in a server has become a 6.5 minute build on my laptop.The real plus has come when running multiple builds simultaneously. Previously 2 builds running together would take around 50 minutes to complete (not great for Continuous Integration). With the intel SSD - 10 minutes and the bottleneck is now the CPU. I see more cores and hyperthreading in my future...
Ipatinga - Monday, August 31, 2009 - link
Another great article about SSD, Anand. Big as always, but this is not just a SSD review or roundup. It´s a SSD class.Here are my points about some stuff:
1 - Correct me if I´m wrong, but as far as capacity goes, this is what I know:
- Manufacturers says their drive has 80GB, because it actually has 80GB. GB comes from GIGA, wich is a decimal unit (base 10).
- Microsoft is dumb, so Windows follows it, and while the OS says your 80GB drive has 74,5GB, it should say 80GB (GIGA). When windows says 74,5, it should use Gi (Gibi), wich is a binary unit).
- To sum up, with a 80GB drive, Windows should say it has 80GB or 74,5GiB.
- A SSD from Intel has more space than it´s advertised 80GB (or 74,5GiB), and that´s to use as a spare area. That´s it. Intel is smart for using this (since the spare area is, well, big and does a good job for wear and performance over sometime).
2 - I wonder why Intel is holding back on the 320GB X25-M... just she knows... it must be something dark behind it...
Maybe, just maybe, like in a dream, Intel could be working on a 320GB X25-M that comes with a second controller (like a mirror of the one side pcb it has now). This would be awesome... like the best RAID 0 from two 160GB, in one X25-M.
3 - Indilinx seems to be doing a good job... even without TRIM support at it´s best, the garbage cleaning system is another good tool to add to a SSD. Maybe with TRIM around, the garbage cleaning will become more like a "SSD defrag".
4 - About the firmware procedure in Indilinx SSD goes, as far as I know, some manufacturers use the no-jumper scheme to make easier the user´s life, others offer the jumper scheme (like G.Skill on it´s Falcon SSD) to get better security: if the user is using the jumper and the firmware update goes bad, the user can keep flashing the firmware without any problem. Without the jumper scheme, you better get lucky if things don´t go well on the first try. Nevertheless, G.Skill could put the SSD pins closer to the edge... to put a jumper in those pins today is a pain in the @$$.
5 - I must ask you Anand, did you get any huge variations on the SSD benchmarks? Even with a dirty drive, the G.Skill Falcon (I tested) sometimes perform better than when new (or after wiper). The Benchmarks are Vantage, CrystalMark, HD Tach, HD Tune.... very weird. Also, when in new state, my Vantage scores are all around in all 8 tests... sometimes it´s 0, sometimes it´s 50, sometimes it´s 100, sometimes it´s 150 (all thousand)... very weird indeed.
6 - The SSD race today is very interesting. Good bye Seagate and WD... kings of HD... Welcome Intel, Super Talent, G.Skill, Corsair, Patriot, bla bla bla. OCZ is also going hard on SSD... and I like to see that. Very big line of SSD models for you to choose and they are doind a good job with Indilinx.
7 - Samsung? Should be on the edge of SSD, but manage to loose the race on the end user side. No firmware update system? You gotta be kidding, right? Thank good for Indilinx (and Intel, but there is not TRIM for G1... another mistake).
8 - And yes... SSD rocks (huge performance benefit on a notebook)... even though I had just one weekend with them. Forget about burst speed... SSD crushes hard drives where it matters, specially sequencial read/write and low latency.
- Let me finish here... this comment is freaking big.